Julia Alvarez emigrated to this country with her parents at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels and has also published three books of poems, two nonfiction books, and eight books for young readers. A writer-in-residence at Middlebury College, Alvarez established with her husband, Bill Eichner, Alta Gracia, an organic coffee farm-literacy arts center, in her homeland, the Dominican Republic.

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, her first novel, originally published in 1991, has received many honors, including the 1991 Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles Award and selection as a notable book by both the New York Times and the American Library Association. The book was later selected as one of twenty-one classics for the twenty-first century by New York librarians and was one of four texts chosen for the national reading project, “A Latino National Conversation,” by the Great Books Foundation. In 2008, the Roundhouse Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland, held the world premiere of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, a play by Karen Zacarias based on the novel.